You might have heard the stories of 6-year-olds coding, 13-year-olds becoming entrepreneurs, and kids becoming millionaires. These stories are true. Almost everyone uses Facebook; its founder Mark Zuckerberg started the company when he was 19 and became a millionaire at 23. Students of this generation are not just restricted to books and schools, they are exploring things beyond, and many of them find huge success. Even the parents have begun supporting them with the resources at hand. In addition, the mighty internet is accessible to help them find many opportunities to grow. Many are taking innovative steps to build their career, implement their passion, expand their online presence, get noticed, establish a brand, and make money. And when they graduate, they would have already established themselves to land their dream job or get along in the journey of entrepreneurship. So, if you are a student wanting to achieve something bigger in life by:
Building your online portfolioStarting a blogWorking on a side project
Or anything else that can help grow your career, having a website of your own becomes necessary. Why do you ask? It’s because your website can help you in many areas, such as:
To improve technical and communication skills.
Acquiring multiple skills is important. Whatever your purpose in creating a website, you will encounter many technologies. It may include website building, designing, SEO, security and privacy aspects, applications, plugins, themes, updates and maintenance, and other things. It will help you big time in the long run, especially when you will make a career in IT. And even if you opt for another field, the internet and computer skills are mandatory these days. It will also help you enhance your communication skills such as presentation, listening, writing, vocabulary, expression, and more. Besides, you can even learn about selling and marketing skills.
Part-time income
When you are a student, you have a long list of dreams, desires, interests, and attractions. All these things may require money, which is why you want your wallet full of cash. Yet, the irony is you don’t have this luxury unless your parents are millionaires. So, through your website, you can decrease your parents’ burdens by taking care of the expenses for your extracurricular activities or any other things you might have planned to do. You can sell products or services like copywriting, graphic designing, or digital products like eBooks and make money.
Career scope
This information era needs you to show yourself out there in all the good ways possible using your talent. Building your career and land opportunities is vital even when the demand is less, and the supply is more. You can carry out extraordinary things like innovations, discoveries, inventions, developing a personal brand, and more. And you can prove you have it in you by showcasing your skills on your website. It helps you garner worldwide recognition, and you can land opportunities from big firms or start one of your own.
Establishing a connection with global communities
By interacting and participating with other people across the globe, students can think big, understand what’s going on in the world, and learn a lot. You can take inspiration from other people’s stories, experiences, and successes/failures that can help you shape your decisions for a better future. But let’s face reality – when you start, you could have little or no resources to invest. Many of you might be on a tight budget as you need to manage everything from your pocket money. Besides, you won’t have a clear picture of what goes into building a website of your own, technicalities, requirements, budget, and more essentials. Don’t worry; if you have around 2-5 dollars in your hands, you can grab a deal, as many website hosting providers offer students discounts. Yes, that’s true! And that’s exactly the goal of this article – to enlighten you with some of those services so that you can host your website even with a tight budget. So, let’s delve in!
SiteGround
If you are searching for a web host to accomplish your project or build a portfolio, you can consider the affordable and reliable service of SiteGround. It is, in fact, one of the three recommended hosting services by WordPress. So, if you plan to use WordPress as your site builder, SiteGround is one of the best you can choose. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, you can utilize its features easily without any trouble. Like the regular plan, the discounted plan comes with powerful features, runs on the latest hardware, and advanced speed through CDN caching, SSD drives, and SuperCacher. Create your site with 1-click and manage everything with ease using Site Tools. You get unlimited MySQL DBs, unmetered traffic, FTP, Git, and SSH access. You also get multiple versions of PHP, automatic daily backups, and email accounts for FREE. SiteGround also offers cPanel together with Softaculous, a 99.99% uptime guarantee, and they have 5 data centers for you to choose from. Discount: Currently, SiteGround is offering an 80% discount on its regular student pricing. Hence, you can avail of web hosting starting from $1.99/month with 10GB storage space and loads of extra freebies. To avail of the discount, you must have valid proof that you are studying at a university and have your student email address.
InMotion Hosting
InMotion has been a consistent service provider to students, educators, and small businesses since 2001, when Google came into existence. It offers useful and interesting features and an award-winning customer support staff to cater to your needs. With InMotion, you get an easy-to-use, Linux-based, and powerful web hosting service compatible with any computer, be it Mac, Linux, or Windows. They offer 24x7x365 US-based support through phone calls, emails, or online chat. You get powerful tools for free that make your first-time website-building journey a smooth ride. Use any CMS from WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, as all of them are open-source and great to use. Your site will be supported by feature-rich and capable programming languages like Perl and PHP. Leverage the most popular open-source database platform of MySQL, server software of Apache, and optimized framework of Ruby on Rails. Discount: Avail up to 50% discount on shared hosting by choosing a 6-month or 12-month plan available at $5.99/month. In case you do not have a .edu email, you can call their Confirmations Team and then fax or email them your student ID’s copy.
Wix
Showcase your work and land lucrative opportunities by creating a high-quality website in Wix. You can create an impressive online portfolio and own it by choosing from hundreds of beautiful templates; otherwise, you can create everything from scratch. It helps you tell your unique story by presenting it in high-quality videos and images. You can also add some social media links like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc., to give social proof to your future employers. Wix also provides you with a custom domain name along with an email address that you can personalize. You will get a wider view of how your website is performing with the help of website analytics. They offer comprehensive contact management, let you create password-protected pages, and allow only your team members to access them. You can include a live chat feature to communicate with your visitors, secure your site with SSL certification, and boost its reach with SEO tools. Apart from this, you get total design freedom with a rich editor, great options to create your online store and add payment methods through PayPal, credit cards, etc., which is commission-free. Discount: Wix offers a 50% discount on its premium and yearly plans. You can use the discount code provided while doing checkout and save a few bucks. For this, you need to register with the Student Beans and verify your status, whether you are still a student or the other way around.
InterServer
InterServer is another good option to consider for students. Its unique solutions plus expertise guarantee an excellent user experience. To deliver easy-to-use control on your site, it offers cPanel as its standard control panel, while Plesk for Windows. They have hundreds of applications available that you can install quickly with their smooth control panel’s help. They include various apps for programming languages, scripts, frameworks, CMSs, ERPs, eCommerce apps, survey tools, and more. You get sturdy raid-10 server hardware along with SSD caching. Also, SQL databases are stored on lightning-fast SSD drives. The service provider loads their servers up to 50% of capacity, which leaves a greater buffer for your sites and helps them grow without any performance issues. With InterServer, you can easily scale your website to a dedicated or VPS server if your needs increase in the future. In case you already have a site, you can migrate it into InterServer FREE of cost. Discount: InterServer offers 30% off on standard web hosting that you can avail of at $4 for a month. It comes with unlimited SSD storage, unlimited email addresses, 450+ cloud apps, SitePad site builder, global content caching, SSL certificate, and Intershield protection.
AccuWeb
To help you students avail web hosting at an affordable price and build a successful career ahead, AccuWeb Hosting has come with students discounts in its web hosting plans. It offers web hosting on CloudLinux operating system, which allows you to isolate one user from another. Hence, the performance and security that you can expect from its server are high. You also get free service by Cloudflare, which boosts your website speed and provides superior protection from internet threats. Access everything and manage your database, email accounts, and all the files seamlessly through a single panel – the innovative cPanel. The hosting plan also lets you leverage varnish that accelerates your page loading speed with the help of employing a caching mechanism. Its main aim is to cache the frequently accessed files and serve them to your visitors within microseconds. AccuWeb Hosting guarantees 99.9% uptime, so you can keep serving your visitors without any interruption. You will also get the support for MySQL database, SSD storage, Python, Perl, PHP, and multiple layer protection from DDOS threats. Remember, it’s a completely FREE hosting service by AccuWeb Hosting for students while still undergraduates. How to avail of it? To get free hosting, you need to apply for it. For that, you must provide the necessary documentation supporting the enrolment in your university.
Record a 2-minute video on your insights about what the next technology trend is going to be within ten years.Next, publish your video on any of your Facebook, YouTube, etc., accounts with the title: “AccuWeb Hosting Free Hosting for Students.”After making the video live, send them an email from your student email address to education@accuwebhosting.com.
They select students based on the quality, originality, and creativity of their idea and response.
Things to keep in mind before you choose a web hosting
With a limited budget at hand, you would never want to get in a situation where you have to change your plan now and then. It will ruin your experience as a first-timer or even for an experienced user for the purpose. While you can’t get everything right, at least you can try to be on the safer side. Consider a few tips to save yourself from extra trouble and choose a good-quality web hosting service.
Identify your needs as to what type of content you want to put up on your website. If it is text-based with some images like a blog, it will consume less space. But if you want to run your vlog or podcast, it will require more space and, thus, more cost. Hence, decide accordingly.Scalable bandwidth is preferred because you would always want your website to grow and welcome more visitors. So, always compare the bandwidth of different services and choose the one based on your preference. If they provide limited bandwidth, check if they allow scaling up with not so much of investment.Check reviews of different web hosts in social forums and from people around you to seek recommendations. You can review their customer service, service quality, security aspects, and more as the deciding parameters.Find out whether they offer a free trial or not. A good hosting provider won’t hesitate to let you try out their service for free for a few days so that you can understand its services more clearly.
Conclusion
I hope now you have a better perspective of having a website of your own. It can help you personally and professionally and be a constant source of income if you have got some skills that people find interesting and can benefit from. So, what are you waiting for? Grab the discounts when you still have the time and create an amazing website out of it. Good luck!
